(1904–90), Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate, born in Novaya Chigla, Russia. Cherenkov (also spelled Cerenkov) was educated at the Voronezh State University. He joined the P.N. Lebedev Institute of Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow as a researcher in 1930, obtained his Ph.D. in 1940, was made a professor of experimental physics in 1953, and became the head of the Institute's photo-meson processes laboratory in 1959.

In 1932 he began to study the LUMINESCENCE, (q.v.) given off by certain liquids when irradiated by gamma rays and, in 1934, discovered a phenomenon now known as the Cherenkov effect. This phenomenon (also called Cherenkov radiation) is the emission of a bluish light from a liquid when electrons or other charged atomic particles emitted from a radioactive source move through the liquid with a velocity greater than that of light in that medium (see Velocity.). That is, the velocity of light, c, is reduced to the velocity c/n in a dialectric medium, where n is the refractive index of the medium. If a particle enters the medium at a velocity very nearly that of c, its velocity can then exceed c in that medium. Two colleagues at Lebedev, the physicists Ilya M. Frank and Igor Y. Tamm, worked out a theoretical interpretation of the Cherenkov radiation in 1937. The discovery resulted in the development of new methods for detecting and measuring the velocity of high-speed ELEMENTARY PARTICLES, (q.v.), and was of great importance for research on nuclear physics. Radiation detectors called Cherenkov counters make use of this phenomenon (see OTHER TYPES OF DETECTORS).

Cherenkov, Frank, and Tamm shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on the Cherenkov effect.

See also NUCLEAR ENERGY,; PARTICLE ACCELERATORS,; RADIATION,.